Sunday, May 24, 2009

The police were in hot pursuit involving gunfire and sports cars on the federal highway Moscow – Saint Petersburg on Wednesday. The perpetrators were speeding away toward Moscow. They managed to get away from the police who chased them down the road for nearly two hours.

At about 10 a.m. the police received the first report about unidentified young men who committed a robbery in the Leningrad region. The criminals were reported to be heading for Moscow, driving two SUVs, a Porsche Cayenne and a Mercedes. A spokesman for the St. Petersburg police said that the criminals had seized the Porsche by force near St. Petersburg. They tied up a female driver, the owner of the car, and shoved her into the back seat. They threw their victim out of the car while crossing the city limits. The woman survived, she is in satisfactory condition, reports Interfax, citing a police spokesman.

The criminals covered quite a distance without raising suspicion of the traffic police. There were special blue license plates (normally installed on police vehicles) on the cars hijacked by the criminals. Besides, the criminals used fake police IDs. They police located the criminals in the Novgorod region. One of the hijacked SUVs, the Porsche, was black. There is no information on the blue license plates, said Mikhail Smirnov, acting chief of the press service of the Novgorog region police department, in an interview to a local newspaper.

The criminals are reported to have produced police IDs at one of the traffic police checkpoints (located at the 510th kilometer of the highway, according to some reports). The criminals refused the step out of the vehicles; they stepped on the gas instead. The police started chasing the criminals, and soon placed a roadblock across the road to stop them. “We blocked the road using heavy trucks near the next checkpoint. After spotting the improvised roadblock, the perpetrators took a U-turn and moved fast in the opposite direction,” Mikhail Smirnov was quoted as saying by Radio Ekho Moskvy.

The SUVs maneuvered dangerously on the road, zipping past the oncoming cars. They could have caused a large-scale traffic accident. At one point the traffic policemen fired a few rounds at the Porsche to stop it. Later the police discovered several bullet holes on the Porsches’ grill. Despite all the efforts taken by the police, the criminals managed to get away from the traffic policemen who drove their Zhiguli 6 patrol car.

As it turned out, the criminals climbed into the Mercedes after getting rid of the damaged Porsche at the 490th kilometer of the highway. The police got a report about the Mercedes which was moving at top speed on the oncoming lane. The pursuit continued for a while. Yet again, the criminals left the police behind and vanished on the horizon.

The police decided to halt traffic in several sections of the highway. As a result, the criminals had to abandon the Mercedes too. The vehicle was later discovered by the police near the village of Krasnye Stavki. Presumably, the criminals jumped out of the car and ran to a nearby forest.

The police are still combing the area in an attempt to track down and arrest the criminals. A number of police dogs are being used. The authorities are going to publish a composite description of one of the criminals in the local newspapers. The reason why the highway pursuit ended in failure for the traffic police is typically Russian: the Zhiguli 6 patrol cars used by the traffic police can never win in a contest of speed against foreign-made SUVs on the road.